At 7:30 on a Saturday night, most of the
crowd attending the annual Made in Hawaii Festival has trickled out of the Neal
S. Blaisdell Center, and exhibitors are wrapping up their business for the day.
Artist Brook Kapukuniahi Parker notices a big, strapping Hawaiian guy silently
staring at his painting of Alapa‘inuiakauaua, the pugnacious ruler of Kohala at
the time of the birth of Kamehameha I.

In the portrait, Alapa‘i is wearing a mahiole
(feather helmet) with a red-and-yellow feathered cape draped around his
shoulders. His tattooed face is turned just enough for him to cast a piercing
look, with one eyebrow raised in indignation. “Excuse me, brah—you looking at
Alapa‘i,” Parker says to the guy. “I know,” the guy says. How in the heck does
he know? Parker wonders. The portrait has no label.

“Nice to meet you,” the guy says. “I got one
question for you. My great-grandfather looked just like that. My last name is
Alapa‘i. How you know that’s how we look like?”

Parker is floored. “You know what, brah? I
was looking at you and thinking, man, you look like my painting—the high
cheekbones, the jawline. Just no more the goatee.” “That’s my tutu-man,” the
guy says, meaning his ancestor. “How you know that’s how we look like?” “I
don’t know. I get help,” Parker tries to explain. “I just know he some punchy
guy, so I made him like, ‘What? You talking to me? What?’ I made him like
that.”

That was the first time Parker crossed paths
with a descendant of someone he painted or was planning to paint, and it’s
happened many times since. The 55-year-old Hawaiian artist specializes in
depicting ancient chiefs, warriors and battles, bringing to visual reality some
of the most notorious and revered leaders in Hawaiian history. While his
inspiration comes from stories retold by the great Hawaiian historians—among
them he names Samuel Kamakau, Abraham Fornander, David Malo, John Papa ‘I‘i and
Stephen Desha—Parker’s passion is rooted in his own family’s history.

One of six brothers who grew up in Kahalu‘u,
O‘ahu, Parker was the one who followed in the footsteps of his father, the
artist and historian David Parker. Surrounded by the books in his dad’s
library—biographies of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, encyclopedias of
ships and aircraft, Kamakau’s Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii, Malo’s Hawaiian
Antiquities and plenty of Mormon Church books—Parker drew Hawaiian warriors and
his favorite cartoon heroes, like Speed Racer and Conan the Barbarian, on brown
paper bags. Years later he relied heavily on his father’s feedback. “Every time
I finished a new painting, I would spin by his Kane‘ohe home and ask if he
could critique it,” Parker recalls. “He was very supportive, from when I
started painting with a brush all the way until the day he passed in 2015.”

I meet Parker for lunch at Treetops Restaurant
in Manoa, where several of his paintings hang. He pulls out a laminated page
with thumbnail portraits and arrows that map out his genealogy. It includes
Drena-Jo Kauakoko‘ipohaiapuninamoku Kalani, his industrious business partner
and wife of twenty-seven years, and their five kids. They’re excited that the
family tree will soon grow another limb—they’re expecting their first
grandchild this summer. “My dad said, ‘To know your Hawaiian history, you have
to know your genealogy,’” Parker explains. “I did this for my kids so they
could know.”

He points to his great-great-grandfather John
Palmer Parker, the founder of Parker Ranch, one of the largest cattle ranches
in the United States, and his wife, Rachael Keli‘ikipikanekaolohaka Ohiaku, who
was a great-granddaughter of King Kamehameha. One of Parker’s first paintings
was of Kame‘eiamoku and Kamanawa, Kamehameha’s twin uncles and close
counselors—and the namesakes for his own twins, who are now 16.

His best-known painting, “‘Aha ‘Ula,”
features the lively congregation of the high chiefs that comprised Kamehameha’s
council of advisors. Many in this circle, Parker says, are Kamehameha’s own
trusted uncles, who served dual roles as warrior generals and high priests. In
2012 this work became the first piece of art by a Native Hawaiian to hang in
the office of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in Washington, DC. It now
hangs in Senator Brian Schatz’s office. A twenty-by-fifteen-foot version graces
the Hawaii Army National Guard headquarters in Kalaeloa.

“Brook has always felt a connection to our
ancestors,” says the artist’s wife, Drena-Jo. “He can work twelve- to
fifteen-hour days if the creative juices are flowing. He feels it’s his kuleana
[responsibility] to share their stories and do his best to make sure they are
historically accurate.”

When Parker talks about the ali‘i (chiefs) he
has painted, he traces their bloodlines for several generations with hardly a
breath between names—who was the father, who was the mother, who was the
father’s mother and the father’s father, the mother’s father and the mother’s
mother, how many siblings were there and so on. And while the names of people
he randomly meets might quickly slip his mind, the names of his ancestors
stick.

“These names are much more than street
signs,” Parker stresses. A wave of emotion moves across his face. “It’s like I
always knew them, but I just missed them. They’re my family. I love them.”

“I believe someday that I will have a
stewardship interview with my ancestors. They’re going to put their heads on my
shoulder, and they’re going to ask me, ‘What have you done with my name?’ And
I’m going to look them in the eye, and I’m going to say, ‘I did the best I could
with the talents I had to keep your name and memory alive and teach my children
to do the same.’”

“When we first got married, I took a painting
class at UH night school,” Parker says, recalling his first formal art class at
the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. “At the first class, I’m looking for the
instructor—there were about thirty people in that class —and I see a lady start
taking off all her clothes.” Oh man, he thought. This is one of those classes.
“I just ended up painting from her neck up,” he laughs. “It was a four-week
class and I already spent the money, so I had to go back. I made sure I sat in
the back. That was my introduction to painting. After the four weeks I put away
my brushes and said, ‘Nah.’”

Twenty years later Parker decided to give
painting another shot. Through classes with one of his favorite Hawai‘i
artists, Patrick Ching, he learned to paint landscapes. Another one of Parker’s
favorite Hawai‘i artists, Edwin Kayton, taught him how to paint with oils. With
Drena’s blessing and willingness to manage the administrative side of the
business, Parker quit his job selling commercial paint and made art his
full-time profession.

In 2010 Parker was in Kona and had the chance
to meet the renowned artist, historian and author Herb Kawainui Kane, someone
he admired and one of his father’s colleagues. “The first thing I say to him
is, ‘Whoa, Mr. Kane, you tall, huh?’ He looks at me, and he goes, ‘Six-four.
What about you, Brook? You six-five?’ I go, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘But I’m 80.’”

That was the beginning of a friendship in
which Kane would critique Parker’s work via email. Parker is humbled when
people tell him he’s “the next Herb Kane” and he’s going to be famous, but he’s
quick to insist, “I’m still learning. None of that was ever on the agenda. All
I want to do is help take care of my family and help tell the stories. That’s
all.”

“What was unique about Herb’s work, in my
opinion, was that it gave us for the first time a visual presentation of the
dignity of the Hawaiian people,” says cultural advisor and Office of Hawaiian
Affairs trustee Peter Apo, a good friend of the late Kane. “Until Herb came
along, the graphic documentation of Hawaiians was generally by early European
explorers who had artists that traveled with them. In the absence of cameras,
that was their way of recording what they were seeing. Those images captured
some of the culture they were seeing, but they were not to scale and lacked
detail.”

“As a Hawaiian growing up in the lost
generation in the ’40s and ’50s, I had no clue what Hawaiians looked like,” Apo
continues. “Herb started to create this time tunnel because he was a historian
and an architect, so his talents were perfectly merged to actually re-create
what the culture looked like and what people looked like and how they dressed,
the way a canoe was lashed, how the ropes went together, down to the nth
detail.”

Referring to “‘Ahu ‘Ula,” Apo points out, “If
you look at Brook’s painting of all the chiefs, where he represents the different
colors of the different districts, the tattoos—again, the level of detail—wow.
Brook’s carrying on that tradition, and that body of work is so valuable for
us.”

Before Kane passed away in 2011, he was
working on “Kamehameha Landing,” a wall-sized painting of King Kamehameha’s war
canoes landing in Waikiki, commissioned by the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.
Unfortunately, his health was quickly declining and the painting was never
finished. “But Herb was thinking ahead. He said that should something happen
and he wasn’t able to finish it, Brook would be the guy to do it,” says Apo,
who had acted as the liaison between Kane and the hotel owners. “Herb was very,
very particular about his work. For him to entrust that kind of integrity to
finish his own work was a pretty awesome validation of Brook’s talent. But
Brook never knew this, which was kind of a cool thing. We never talked about it
until a few years later.” Ultimately, the hotel decided to leave the painting
hanging unfinished. “Every time I go to the Royal Hawaiian, I go to the painting
and have my little time there. I study, I look at the brushstrokes,” says
Parker. “He’s not here, but he’s still teaching.”

A few years ago Parker was watching the boys
play football at Punahou School, where his daughter is a junior. He noticed the
“O” with wings on the sides of the football players’ helmets and suspected it
was a throwback to Oahu College, the school’s original name. He asked one of
the boys, who confirmed, “All of the men’s teams, Uncle, are known as the Sons
of Oahu.” Wait a minute, Parker thought, as he remembered the epic blitz by
eight rogue O‘ahu warriors who fended off six hundred Maui invaders. It’s time
to paint the original Sons of O‘ahu.

“History is written from the point of the
victors,” Parker says, explaining that this raid was embarrassing for Maui
chief Kahekili, who later went on to conquer O‘ahu. In his painting, “The O‘ahu
Eight,” the eight chiefs are emerging from a fiery blaze of war, their chiseled
bodies ready to leap off the canvas with spears and shark-toothed clubs in
hand.

The invasion, Parker relates, happened
following a similarly dramatic plot that involved Kahekili tricking O‘ahu chief
Kahahana into murdering his high priest, Ka‘opulupulu, who had been the main
obstacle thwarting Kahekili’s plans to take O‘ahu. As soon as Ka‘opulupulu was
out of the way, Kahekili prepared his navy to attack. “Never before and after
will you hear a story like that, so few against so many. Why it’s not widely
known is because all these guys died in battle,” Parker says. He points to the
man in the painting leading the charge. “Except the middle guy. He escapes to
Kaua‘i, he changes his last name and he lives.”

Parker then launches into an epilog. “I
finished the painting, and it’s hanging in my booth at the Hawaiian convention,
where you got kanaka [native people] from Kaua‘i to Ka‘u. On the last day of
the event, early in the morning, a gentleman walks in. He walks right up to the
painting.” “Pupuka, yeah?” the man says, referring to the middle guy. “YES,”
Parker replies in amazement, because most people don’t recognize the warriors,
and very few can name them. “How in the world did you know that?” The man says,
“That’s my name.” “Your name Pupuka?” Parker says in disbelief. “Nice to meet
you, brah.” “Yeah, that’s my tutu-man,” the guy says. “I saw the painting the
first day. I was talking to my great-great-great-grandfather and them guys.”
“What you mean?” “They were all here the first day,” the guy says, meaning his
long-gone ancestors. “What?” “They were all in your booth. They were all
looking at the painting.”

“And?” Parker asks apprehensively. “They
happy someone telling their side of the story,” the man replies. “You the
artist? You know who Pupuka was?” “I know he was one of the generals,” Parker
offers. “Pupuka was one of Kahahana’s sons,” the man says. “He escaped to
Kaua‘i. That’s why you’re talking to me. My great-grand-father looked just like
that!”